As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Increasingly, information handling systems are deployed in architectures that allow multiple operating systems to run on a single information handling system. Labeled “virtualization,” this type of information handling system architecture decouples software from hardware and presents a logical view of physical hardware to software. In a virtualized information handling system, a single server can act and behave as multiple, independent servers. Server virtualization is enabled primarily by a piece of software, often called the hypervisor, that sits between the server hardware and the multiple operating systems, also called guest operating systems (guest OS). The hypervisor software provides a container that presents a logical hardware interface to the guest operating systems. An individual guest operating system, along with any applications or other software running on it, thinks it is running on a physical server and is known as a virtual machine.
Often, these architectures are employed for numerous reasons, e.g., (1) increased hardware resource utilization; (2) cost-effective scalability across a common, standards-based infrastructure; (3) workload portability across multiple servers; (4) streamlining of application development by certifying to a common virtual interface rather than multiple implementations of physical hardware; and/or (5) encapsulation of complex configurations into a file that is easily replicated and provisioned.
However, an information handling system having a virtualized architecture may have a disadvantage when certain hardware errors occur, as such errors occurring in one virtual machine may cause all virtual machines running on the information handling system to crash or shut down.